Lion Frees Itself From Frozen Water By Biting Its Own Tail In Half

By: Christopher Feery | January 8, 2019

When faced with the option of taking a little pain and getting the heck out of there or sticking around and risking near certain death, most folks will choose the former option. It’s really not much of a choice when faced with such an incredibly harrowing set of circumstances.

On the one hand, pain is certainly going to hurt, and there’s no guarantee that it’s magically going to disappear in an instant. However, there’s absolutely no coming back from the latter choice, so it’s pretty tough to justify that as being the prescient choice between the two alternatives.

When you think it through from the perspective of a human, it obviously makes sense to assume the conclusion that will eventually be reached. But how would that same choice play out with a member of the Animal Kingdom?

While results will obviously vary depending on the situation at hand and the animal involved, we now have a clear sign of the way that the so-called King of the Jungle will lean when faced with such a choice.

As the Daily Mail shares, the sign comes from the Taiyuan Zoo in Shanxi Province in China. Tourists that were visiting the zoo came across the lion den, and many became alarmed when they saw that there was a lion that was missing part of its tail.

It looked as if the lion had gnawed off its own tail, and visitors wanted to know what the heck was going on. Was the lion in some kind of a fight with one of the other animals? Had the lion been rescued from a bad situation and come to the zoo as part of its recovery? Is there some kind of neglect going on here?

Those are among the questions that were swirling around, and the matter quickly picked up traction on Chinese social media. That prompted a zoo spokesperson to explain the situation in an attempt to allay fears.

It turns out that the lion had fallen asleep with its tail inside of a watering hole. Due to the frigid temperatures, the hole wound up freezing over. The lion woke up to find itself in a real pickle, and it decided that it valued freedom over its tail.

Employees would discover that the lion was bleeding and immediately tended to it to get the bleeding under control. The lion suffered tissue damage, and it was placed on medication to help it heal up.

While that explains what happened to the lion’s tail, it doesn’t answer some other questions that have popped up about the lions that are in the care of the zoo. Many of the lions appear to be underfed and malnourished, and some rather alarming photos of them help to drive that point home.

One user on social media even went as far as to claim that the lions look to be ‘depressed.’ The zoo hasn’t offered up anything resembling a statement on the overall condition of the lions as of yet, but many users aren’t about to let it go.

This could all be a simple misunderstanding based on some selectively edited photos, but the longer the zoo goes without offering up some kind of statement on the matter, the more it appears that there’s something to see here. We’ll hold out hope that the lions are being properly cared for.